Part 1 of 2. (Photo: Nico Ortega)
They say you learn more from failure than success. If so, this is the story for you: MIT Technology Review’s annual roll call of the biggest flops, flimflams, and fiascos in all domains of technology.
Some of the foul-ups were funny, like the "woke” AI which got Google in trouble after it drew Black Nazis. Some caused lawsuits, like a computer error by CrowdStrike that left thousands of Delta passengers stranded. We also reaped failures among startups that raced to expand from 2020 to 2022, a period of ultra-low interest rates. But then the economic winds shifted. Money wasn’t free anymore. The result? Bankruptcy and dissolution for companies whose ambitious technological projects, from vertical farms to carbon credits, hadn’t yet turned a profit and might never do so.
Read on.
Woke AI blunder
People worry about bias creeping into AI. But what if you add bias on purpose? Thanks to Google, we know where that leads: Black Vikings and female popes.
Google’s Gemini AI image feature, launched last February, had been tuned to zealously showcase diversity, damn the history books. Ask Google for a picture of German soldiers from World War II, and it would create a Benetton ad in Wehrmacht uniforms.
Critics pounced and Google beat an embarrassed retreat. It paused Gemini’s ability to draw people and agreed its well-intentioned effort to be inclusive had “missed the mark.”
The free version of Gemini still won’t create images of people. But paid versions will. When we asked for an image of 12 CEOs of public biotech companies, the software produced a photographic-quality image of middle-aged white men. Less than ideal. But closer to the truth.
Boeing Starliner
Boeing, we have a problem. And it’s your long-delayed reusable spaceship, the Starliner, which stranded NASA astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore on the International Space Station.
The June mission was meant to be a quick eight-day round trip to test Starliner before it embarked on longer missions. But, plagued by helium leaks and thruster problems, it had to come back empty.
Now Butch and Suni won’t return to Earth until 2025, when a craft from Boeing competitor SpaceX is scheduled to bring them home.
Credit Boeing and NASA with putting safety first. But this wasn’t Boeing’s only malfunction during 2024. The company began the year with a door blowing off one of its planes midflight, faced a worker strike, agreed to a major fine for misleading the government about the safety of its 737 Max airplane (which made our 2019 list of worst technologies), and saw its CEO step down in March.
After the Starliner fiasco, Boeing fired the chief of its space and defense unit. “At this critical juncture, our priority is to restore the trust of our customers and meet the high standards they expect of us to enable their critical missions around the world,” Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, said in a memo.
CrowdStrike outage
The motto of the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike is “We stop breaches.” And it’s true: No one can breach your computer if you can’t turn it on.
That’s exactly what happened to many people on July 19, when thousands of Windows computers at airlines, TV stations, and hospitals started displaying the “blue screen of death.”
The cause wasn’t hackers or ransomware. Instead, those computers were stuck in a boot loop because of a bad update shipped by CrowdStrike itself. CEO George Kurtz jumped on X to say the “issue” had been identified as a “defect” in a single computer file.
So who is liable? CrowdStrike customer Delta Airlines, which canceled 7,000 flights, is suing for $500 million. It alleges that the security firm caused a “global catastrophe” when it took “uncertified and untested shortcuts.”
CrowdStrike countersued. It says Delta’s management is to blame for its troubles and that the airline is due little more than a refund.
Vertical farms
Grow lettuce in buildings using robots, hydroponics, and LED lights. That’s what Bowery, a “vertical farming” startup, raised over $700 million to do. But in November, Bowery went bust, making it the biggest startup failure of the year, according to the business analytics firm CB Insights.
Bowery claimed that vertical farms were “100 times more productive” per square foot than traditional farms, since racks of plants could be stacked 40 feet high. In reality, the company’s lettuce was more expensive, and when a stubborn plant infection spread through its East Coast facilities, Bowery had trouble delivering the green stuff at any price.
To be continued...
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